Polydrons
Every school I've ever taught at seem to have set of Polydron shapes. Why?
"Polydron products are recognised as an important educational tool for children of all ages... Using Polydron is fun - when children are having fun they learn more readily."
In addition to using them for teaching properties of 2D and 3D shapes, tesseleation, plans and elevations they can be built into lessons covering much more topics than just these.
This collection includes a huge range of practical teaching ideas to help your pupils engage with the maths using polydrons.
Primary Mathematics with Polydron
This primary mathematics booklet contains a host of activities, puzzles, questions and investigations that could be used as starters or the basis for longer activies with pupils of a range of ages.
Mathematics with Polydron
Thirty six activites with polydrons. Including:
Working in Two Dimensions investigates polygrams, tessellations, isosceles triangles and right-angles triangles.
Regular Solids investigates prisms and antiprisms, platonic solids, rings and dishes and Archimedean solids.
Investigating Solids explores unfolding a cube, pyramids, convex deltahedra, isosceles triangles and right-angled triangles.
Developing Reasoning contains four investigations:
• Build and balance - making 3D L-shapes from cubes and predicting which shapes will balance on one face
• Logi-solids – students build the required cube by following a set of clues
• Red and blue - students build the required shapes using only blue and red tiles
• Minimum colours – students make shapes using the minimum number of different colours where no two adjacent tiles are the same colour
Developing Imagery has four activities all designed to develop the ability to conjure up images and function in a mathematical way with them.
Developing Algebra contains four activities which lend themselves to promoting work with algebra.
Extending Your Ideas contains three more demanding activities.
The book concludes with a glossary and list of useful reading.
Platonic Solids
Introduce classifiaction of 3D shapes and explore forming different solids. Explore the five platonic solids and explain why there are only five.
Making Molecules
Explore how topics such as number patterns, simple algebra, reflection and rotation can be applied in chemistry.
NRICH task with Polydrons
Ideas to investigate involing polydron squares and pentominoes